About Me

Wednesday, 16 December 2009

If it's not on the frount cover of "Grazia" it hasn't really happned yet.

Celebrity news is a lot like fish; we want it fresh, we like it juicy and in Japan they eat them raw. The internet until recently, was the fishing trawler we sailed in, roughing the winds of rubbish websites and free porn to get you the stories about stars that you needed, stat. The early days of the internet were like the wild west of celebrity news, there were no rules, no legal teams, it didn’t even have to be true, who cared- yeehaa!

Today, however, if you were to hear, that say a certain pop star had not only broken up with her boyfriend but also flown a passenger plane into a landmark building in the process, when you googled it at work, searching desperately for an adrenaline shot of excitement in the flat lining monotony of your office day, when Mr. Google rooted around in his big bag of facts, that story wouldn’t necessarily be the first to pop up on his little page.

Killjoy celebrities now employ people specifically to sieve through search results ensuring that the more embarrassing stories are firmly locked in the dusty forgotten vaults of result page three. According to my recent spins the most popular searches about Tiger Woods have to do with something called the PGA (I’m assuming it’s some nineties girl band he’s impregnated) and the area of Kate Moss’s life people genuinely find the most interesting, according to her google reports is her chuffing Topshop knicker range. It’s airbrushing but for the entire internet, untaggging all the unwanted icky bits and deleting all the double chins. I’m sure when George Orwell, rasping over a typewriter predicted the fiendish big brother brilliance of fact eradication, he had no idea his TB riddled mind wasn’t actually forecasting Stalin’s Russian but the future of celebrity PR.

Catch of the day is Catherine Zeta Jones, returning to the stage after over twenty years to appear on Broadway. I feel sorry for CZJ, when she first winked and caught the world’s attention she was a fresh faced stunner in her late twenties, relishing her moment in the Hollywood sun. This was the dream that had kept her going all those damp years down the pit in Wales, tap-dancing through the strikes, pirouetting down those damn valleys. As she walked up her first red carpet she surely thought, damn you Maggie, this is one mine you won’t close down.

But I think she mixed up admiring the vintage years of the moving pictures and actually getting married to it. She probably meant to say to Michael Douglas “Hey, what was Charlie Chaplin really like?” but what came out was “Yes, of course I’ll marry you”. Poor Kecko, he looks like a sandcastle that one more wave is going to collapse. Catherine always dressed like a star, but unfortunately it was a star from the nineteen thirties who was still alive and trying desperately to prove she still had it, while actresses the same age as her skipped by in skinny jeans. And now tragically she is forty and at the age when she should be moving onto her tasteful Donna Karen phase , she’s looking like an Upper East side granny.

I’ve a horrible feeling that if her and Michael bit the dust she’ll pull a Mariah on us and dress for the next decade in dental floss.

Sometimes your only hope on the celebrity high seas is that a story isn’t true, that a line isn’t twitching, that it’s all a dream. Here goes-Reese Witherspoon and Jake Gyllenhall might be splitting up.

I know, let’s just change the subject for a little bit to allow our subconscious to process that information while our conscious mind retracts from the idea like an elastic band made out of molten lava and broken dreams. X Factor- Joe won! Didn’t Cheryl look nice; apparently her and Ashley want to have a baby. That’s about as likely as...

And we’re back. The couple who had been dating for two years have reluctantly decided to split. Friends say that Jake AKA the world’s perfect man, was looking for more commitment while Reese, still smarting from her divorce from Ryan Phillipe was reluctant to get remarry. This beggars the question how shitty must her marriage have been to turn down the chance to be Mrs. Gyllenhall?

To put it into context, had Joseph Fritzel’s daughter, pre counselling, her eyes still blinking in the fresh Austrian morning air, been showed a picture of him in his little check shirt and asked if she was up for it, she’d been picking out wedding dresses before you could say, feck it every family has their problems. It’s with news like this that I turn to the sacred showbiz columnist prayer “If it’s not on the front cover of Grazia it hasn’t really happened yet”. You scoff but I plan to use it to sit out the next general election.